Celebrating One Year of Big Tech Power: ChatGPT’s Anniversary!
Big Tech’s dominance is unquestionable, as evidenced by the recent boardroom crisis at OpenAI, the company behind the groundbreaking release of ChatGPT, marking a year since its historic launch. The AI revolution has arrived.
In some ways, the low-key unveiling of ChatGPT on November 30 last year was a revenge for the geeks, the unsung researchers and engineers who have been quietly building generative AI behind the scenes.
With the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a well-known figure in tech circles but little known since then, ensured that this unheard-of AI technology gets the attention it deserves.
ChatGPT became the fastest-adopted app in history (since it was taken over by Meta’s Threads), with users marveling at the generation of poems, recipes—or whatever the Internet has gathered—in seconds.
Altman’s gamble catapulted the 38-year-old Stanford dropout to stardom—making him a kind of AI king whose every word the world’s leaders and sons hang on.
With artificial intelligence, “you’re making and selling things you can’t put your hands on,” said University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara and author of “The Code,” a history of Silicon Valley.
“It’s really important to find someone who can explain it, especially when it’s advanced technology,” he added.
– “Religious fundamentalism” –
Altman’s devotion to AI can often seem almost religious.
OpenAI’s students trust that the world will be a better place if they are given free rein (and cash) to build general AI—AI at or beyond the capabilities of the human mind.
But the high cost of that sacred mission forced an alliance with Microsoft, the world’s second-largest company, which operates for profit, not altruism.
Microsoft pledged $13 billion to OpenAI earlier this year, and Altman guided the company to earn the money to justify the investment.
That ultimately prompted a boardroom mutiny this month from those — including OpenAI’s lead researcher — who believe money makers should be kept out.
“There’s ‘religious fundamentalism at play here,'” venture capitalist Dave Morin told The Information on a podcast after Altman was unceremoniously fired from OpenAI and reinstated five days later.
The AI research community has “almost deified this technology,” he added.
After the fight broke out, Microsoft defended Altman, and OpenAI’s young staff supported him too, aware that the company’s future came from the revenue that kept computers humming, not lofty ideas about how AI should or shouldn’t be used.
– AI Agent –
This tension between saving the world or destroying it has been the year since the release of ChatGPT.
For example, Elon Musk signed a letter calling for a halt to AI innovation, only to launch his own company, xAI, to join an increasingly crowded market months later.
Google, Meta and Amazon have all woven AI promises into their company announcements and invested in AI startups.
Killer robot or magic wand, companies in all industries are signing up to experiment with AI, usually through their cloud providers, Microsoft, Google or Amazon or OpenAI.
“The time from learning that generative AI was a thing to deciding to spend time building apps around it has been the shortest I’ve ever seen for any technology,” said Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester Research.
But there are still fears that bots might “hallucinate” and spread false, nonsensical or offensive material, so the company’s actions are modest so far.
One company is an artificial intelligence agent, a type of enhanced chatbot that can help office workers churn through emails, write memos or have fun while instant messaging.
Software programmers praise the power of Github’s developer collaboration platform.
“It’s about spreading the benefits of AI broadly to everyone,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this month.
The rush to artificial intelligence is fueling fears of dangers such as human extinction and societal concerns such as prejudice, job displacement and disinformation on an industrial scale.
Industry observers say users who create pornographic deepfakes of classmates or biased AI weeding out loan applicants should be targeted by regulators.
– “Capitalists win” –
Whatever the next chapter of artificial intelligence is, it won’t be written without tech giants like Microsoft, who may soon get a seat on the company’s board in the wake of boardroom drama.
“We saw yet another Silicon Valley battle between idealists and capitalists, and the capitalists won,” said historian O’Mara.
Nor will the next chapter of artificial intelligence be written without Nvidia, the maker of AI’s secret ingredient, the graphics card or GPU, the powerful chip necessary to make AI work.
Tech giant, startup, or researcher—everyone needs to get their hands on chips made in Taiwan, which are both expensive and hard to come by.
The big tech companies – Microsoft, Amazon, Google – are at the front of the line.
